you're a vacuum at this point.
you take in all the dirt,
but more often than that
you **** up your great grandmother's pearls.
to tear at one loose seam in the carpet,
and suddenly you're standing alone in a room full of yarn.
time is cold and unforgiving on the crinkles that
used to appear at the corners of your eyes when you smiled.
cold and unforgiving on beautiful hands that now claw at your skin waiting for its fix.

i don't remember what your smile looks like.

the air feels like fire.
it’s cold but there’s something lingering in it
and it burns enough to make you warm.
it envelops you in hundreds of smells, wet pavement, fresh paint, gasoline, salt, the smells of a city alive at night.
heads and ears pulsating and ringing as the hundreds of voices surrounding you dance.
it’s been nine days since a boy was shot in cold blood
by an unpunished officer.
"protect and serve"
there are hundreds of sweating and shaking bodies surrounding your own in a protestor’s dance.
on a crisp night like this, nobody is a singled.
we are one, screaming, angry, and trembling mass.
a man walks by.
usually you would take into account his presence.
you would notice that he was tall, towering over you, or the scar that ran through his thick eyebrow like lightning. usually you’d be gripped by an unintentional fear by his overpowering existence, but tonight it doesn’t matter.
maybe take into attention the tiny pale woman who’s body was shoved into yours, and how her bones jut out like they’re trying to escape. tonight is not that night.
tonight is the night where the streets of portland, maine, and hundreds of other cities around the world
run with sweat and tears.
tonight is the night in which humanity falls like dropping a feather in the wind.
tonight is passion like boiling water from a teapot long ignored.

time tastes a lot like rotting flowers
when your skin is made of clouded glass.

breathing feels much like falling
when you've tasted the outer limits of hell.

laughter mimics broken bells when you've watched thousands of suns sink behind ever-growing mountains.

burial plans begin just when you've begun to stand.

humanity grows cancerous flowers in dying bones
from the moment the human is born.

forests replaced with corruption and greed,
limbs of trees hardened like hearts.
generations of infant soldiers raised on pills and bills,
grey men with white hair in black suits giving instructions on how to exist.
green paper playing king, white house playing god,
a minimal but calculated color scheme.

an infinity;
the civil war of souls.